Some 25 Years ago, Benny Eng opened a Chinese Restaurant on Pico Blvd. near Robertson on the west side of Los Angeles called Wan Q.
A quarter of a century back meant a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles was simply that--a Chinese restaurant! No frills, just good Cantonese Food purveyed in establishments offering various degrees of oriental trappings.
But somewhere along the way came the Polynesian explosion. Donn Beach probably began the whole thing with his Don the Beachcomber way back in the early thirties. Vic Bergeron picked up on the idea later when he changed the name of Hinky Dink's in Oakland to the now familiar name of Trader Vic's.
Benny Eng, caught in the Polynesian net, redid his place prettily with rattan, bamboo, tikis and waterfalls where today it stands as one of the few remaining that is as worthy a restaurant for its food as for its adventurous decor.
Like most Polynesian restaurants, Wan Q carries rumaki (a Don the Beachcomber invention) and the mai tai cocktail (one of Trader Vic's creations). However Wan Q, like the beer commercial says, is a lot more.
After or during a round or two from the extensive list of "tropi-cocktails", from whence you can easily become pie-eyed from a pi-yi, swizzled from a rum swizzle or catatonic from a zombie, there is a wonderful dipping-and-eating-of-appetizers ceremony. Besides the usual ketchup and mustard dipping sauce, Wan Q puts a marvelously piquant sweet and sour plum sauce on every table.
On Monday night, the fact that it was Labor Day didn't seem to affect the usual goings-on. The place was busy although not busting at the seams. Jimmy Gee, waiter extraordinary, and a 15-year employe (sic) at the restaurant, described every dish he brought with tremendous verve, his jollity catching on with us and making the whole experience extremely enjoyable. He delivered you gau (minced chicken, shrimp, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, wrapped in a half moon shape and deep fried in egg batter, $1.20) and called it Chinese ravioli--which I've also heard applied to Won Ton--and sui mui (chopped meat, chicken, shrimp, vegetables, spices, wrapped in noodle dough, topped in sesame seeds, steamed, served with brown sauce, $1.20) and called in Chinese Kreplach.
The witty, informative, knowledgeable and on-the-spot waiter served us barbecued spareribs ($2.20) of good flavor despite an apparent fattiness and chewiness and also bula maka ($1.95), as tender as the ribs weren't. The latter translates into thin strips of juicy beef tenderloin swimming in a tangy ginger sauce, sometimes served in kabob fashion on a bamboo spear.
Although we were Eng-ulfed (sic-pun!) in food, we opted for the jar du gai salad ($2.85) over wor wonton soup and our mmms and aahs could be heard throughout the dining room. Resembling an uncrispy version of of the crispy chicken salad of northern China, the jar du gai was beautifully light and palate-cleansing as a salad should be; a delicate harmony of shredded chicken, almond nuts, spices, chopped lettuce, long rice, chopped green onions and sesame seeds.
The effervescent, skillful, little Jimmy quickly bustled in with the first entree dish, scallops kow ($2.95); the delightfully soft crustaceans (ahem!) amid two different mushroom types, pea pods, and bamboo shoots in a creamy garlic sauce.
Incidentally, one more point in the smiling waiter's favor was his careful toweling of each clean plate before it was placed before us, a small but important chore rarely undertaken by either waiters, waitresses or busboys today.
Host Eng, who seemed slightly surprised that we requested chopsticks, figures about 35 per cent of his Wan Q clientele asks for them these days. (How surprised can you be when something happens better than one out of three times??--Pappy) They are not included in the place settings. He said 25 years ago, very few of his occidental patrons (Hey, we prefer the term European Americans!--pappy) would even dare to give chopsticks a try.
Eng took me on a quick tour of the kitchen, ("Hey, Jimmy! Move cats to freezer for five minutes.") a much larger facility than expected. He admitted to five enlargements of dining rooms and-or kitchen during his two and a half decades as Wan Q proprietor and said he currently has plans afoot for some interior decor (NOOOooo!) and structural changes.
'It looks like you have a lot of woks here," (Oh, brother.) I said as we traversed the spacious cooking area and a noticed a long row of the huge cooking pans so necessary in the preparation of Chinese food. "We have 11 of them," he smiled proudly, and when asked if that was a lot (Didn't we just establish this?), he said that the only Chinese restaurant he was aware of with more was the Golden Dragon in New Chinatown. ("That's it, we're outta here!")
Going whole hog (between $6 and $10 per person excluding drinks) like we did and ordering a la carte may be the best but not the most economical way to dine here. Complete dinners for two or more range from $3.50 to $6.95 per person and I was astonished to find on the back page of the menu and almost hidden chicken chow mein and prix fixe, (He got me; I had to look this up. It means "A complete meal of several courses, sometimes with choices permitted, offered by a restaurant at a fixed price.") full course Cantonese meal for two at $2.75 a head.
If the word gets around about this there should soon be one heckuva queue at Wan Q.

Great post Pappythesailor! I love reading about these places!! Something in the history and nostalgia of it all. It's also because these places just aren't around here anymore!

It was a different time when people/servers liked what they were doing and cared about the way and how they did it. The restaurants details and decor was to help achieve the goal that it's time to relax, eat, drink and have some fun!!
Dining out should be an experience and that's what these types of places achieved!

Bora Boris - Thanks for adding the photos! Always better to see pictures to go along with it all. Before and after photos are great way to show how they years have changed these establishments.

I have seen a couple different mugs out there with Wan-Q on them I believe. In mind straight away is the OMC Mug that is in the dark beige color with the dark brown dragon wrapped around it.

Here is a scan of one of their matchbooks. Has a nice image of their tiki sign on the front, but the image of the building has horrible printing.

I also found this interesting article about the restaurant on povonline.com:

"Wan-Q was a terrific Chinese restaurant located on Pico Boulevard, just east of Robertson, in the building that now houses another terrific Chinese restaurant called Fu's Palace. Unlike Wan-Q, Fu's Palace is not a dark place full of tropical decor and little streams and waterfalls that run through the room. I took some of my first dates to Wan-Q because it seemed to be that kind of place, but its main clientele was local Jewish families.

If you were Jewish in the sixties in Los Angeles, it seemed almost mandatory that your family have a favorite Chinese restaurant. In that area, loyalties were divided between Wan-Q and a place a few blocks east on Pico named Kowloon, which is also now long gone. There were other Chinese eateries along that stretch of Pico but somehow, even local newspaper reporters sensed the great Wan-Q/Kowloon rivalry and wrote of it. We were Wan-Q people but once, just to be fair-minded, we dined at Kowloon and confirmed our hunch that it was inferior.

The waiters at Wan-Q were great and they really did fit the Great Chinese Waiter Stereotype of all looking alike...but you could tell them apart by the loud Hawaiian-style shirts they wore. There was one who thought the funniest thing in the world was to ask, when a family ordered something with pork in it, "Are you Joosh?" That was how he pronounced "Jewish."

Wan-Q was the first place I ever had Chinese Food and to this day, my concept of the right way to prepare certain dishes is rooted in how they were prepared there. It was a sad day when they went out of business, not only for my family and for the proprietors of Wan-Q but also for whoever owned that building. It proceeded to house a veritable United Nations of different failed restaurants (Mexican, Polynesian, Jamaican, etc.) before finally, after a decade or so, reverting to its birthright as a Chinese eatery. I used to drive by and marvel at how each new tenant adapted some of the exterior decor of the previous resident. The odd roof that's there now and the split telephone poles nailed to the sides of the building are, I believe, leftovers from the Polynesian period. They didn't make a lot of sense then, either."

I sat down, 20 seconds later the waiter brought over a bowl of crunchy rice noodles and tangy duck sauce.

The tea : Black, none of that foo foo Jasmine crap all the new places serve.

The have the REAL egg rolls, with pork and shrimp, as well as the now-standard-issue "spring rolls"

I ordered some egg rolls and Sweet and Sour Chicken. The egg rolls were great...totally old school, they came with sweet and sour and hot mustard on the side.

The Sweet and Sour Chicken as decent...white meat, not quite saucy enough for my taste, but still damn good.

I also noticed later on the menu that they have "NY Style Chow Mein" (stated that way on the menu....Awesome) ! Very hard to find that in LA.

So....2 Thumbs up on the food.

The big waterfall is there, and still works.You could see the grandeur of the old place...it's pretty big inside, and you could tell, that a few weeks in the hands of Bamboo Ben, Tiki Diablo, Bosko and Crazy Al, and this place would be Amazing .

I inquired to the manager about anything Tiki leftover, but the last place before it took it all when they moved....It was "The Sugar Shack" , which I'd heard about before I moved to LA...it was a rock club...lots of punk and powerpop bands played there. It was their second location "Jacks Sugar Shack" that was home to my old band's first show.

Anyway, it's no longer Tiki, but it's still a great. old school Chinese joint.

Long Live Wan-Q !

Look for a Possible Tikiyaki Orchestra function at this place in the future.